James Ellroy, Frank Stanford, and Literary Pointillism

Coined in the late 1880s to deride the works it describes, “pointillism” refers to a style of Impressionistic painting that employs discrete points of color that, when viewed from a distance, cohere into a single image. Notable pointillist artworks include Georges Seurat’s 1886 A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte and Roy Lichtenstein’s 1964 Ohhh… Alright (pictured below), both of which--despite the nearly eighty years between them--serve as near perfect examples of the style. They are images created in composite; every individual dot relies on its neighbor for meaning.
 

The literary works of James Ellroy and Frank Stanford operate based on a similar principle. In Ellroy’s later novels and throughout Stanford’s poetry, each sentence (or line, as the case may be) typically contains a single image, emotion, or action. As one sentence/line builds on the one before it and segues into the next, the scene or scenario takes shape in the reader’s mind.
 

Obviously, this is how all fiction functions in one way or another, with each sentence/line contributing finally to the whole, but where Ellroy and Stanford differ is in their concision. Take, for instance, the following passage from Ellroy’s American Tabloid:

He heard footsteps behind him. Hands slammed him across the hood and ripped off his gunbelt.
He gouged his face on a sharp strip of chrome. He saw Chick Leahy and Court Meade kick Mal’s door down.
Big men in suits and overcoats swarmed him. His glasses fell off. Everything went claustrophobic and blurry.
Hands dragged him into the street. Hands cuffed and shackled him.
A midnight-blue limo pulled up.

And compare it with the following excerpt from Stanford’s poem “Freedom, Revolt, and Love”:

She started to get up.

One of them shot her.

She leaned over the table like a schoolgirl doing her lessons.

The still images contained within the sentences/lines, coupled with the forward narrative thrust of each piece, creates a cinematic effect. The sentences/lines flip past at twenty four frames a second, creating the illusion of movement on the page. Finally, in the capable hands of Ellroy and Stanford, have prose and poetry been granted the immediacy and presence of celluloid.